A Study Of Language Learning Anxiety On EFL Teaching At Tertiary Level

In recent years, English learning has attracted more and more attention of many researchers and teachers in China. For a long time, Chinese EFL teaching has been following the model of "teacher-centeredness" for certain reasons. This teaching model emphasizes the cognitive aspect, but ignores the affective factors. That is, students, as subjects of learning, used to be neglected. So "emotional illiteracy" is a common phenomenon in our foreign language teaching and learning. This is very harmful to language learning and students' all-round development.In the 1960s, Humanism came into being. The late 20th century witnessed an important shift of focus of EFL teaching, that is, from the teacher to the learner. There has been an increasing interest among researchers in the role of affective factors in English learning, esp. those negative emotions that may result in negative effects to the students' learning, such as: anxiety, fear, shyness, nervousness, anger and hatred, all of which are assumed to influence the individual learners greatly. Among them, anxiety is generally acknowledged to be the most important one that obstructs college students from learning English well.There have been many studies investigating learners' affective factors in our country, yet little research has been focused on the effect of language anxiety in EFL teaching and learning, especially for college students. Generally speaking, college students are more than 18 years old and have become adults. As we know, adults have their own characteristics in the process of learning foreign languages. They are more self-conscious than children and pay more attention to others' response or attitudes towards their behavior. Compared with children, college students will meet with more difficulties in language learning because they can be hardly changed in the following aspects: psychology, affection, cognition, cultural identity and learning method. Therefore, even if they spend much time and energy on language learning, yet they can't promote their language ability effectively and promptly. Thus it is more likely for language anxiety to occur in their language learning. This kind of affection will hinder language learning very seriously.As foreign language teachers, if we are concerned with students' affect, we can make language teaching more effective and efficient. In this sense, it's necessary and urgent for us to know about the effect of anxiety in college English classroom, and find ways to reduce high anxiety that is very harmful in foreign language learning. Therefore we should try to create a kind of comfortable classroom atmosphere by using all kinds of means. Only in this way can we reduce students' anxiety and ensure teaching quality and efficiency. The present study explores college students' anxiety on English learning and offers several proposals on reducing anxiety in English classrooms.